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Personality and Performance: Research Review

(adapted from: Ronald A. Warren , The Achievement Paradox (Chapter 4), 2002)

High performers share a set of characteristics that set them apart: they are optimistic, hard working, ambitious, open-minded, patient and encouraging. They work well independently and with teams. On the LMAP Profile, they score high on six traits: Conscientiousness, Achievement Drive, Innovation, Openness to Feedback, Helpfulness, and Sociability.

A large body of research supports the notion that these six traits are associated with high performance, across a spectrum of different jobs, industries, and demographics (gender, race, age). These traits may be labeled differently: for example, sociability is sometimes referred to as affiliation or gregariousness, but the attitudes and behaviors embodied by these terms undoubtedly impact job success and satisfaction.

Most people have at least one or several of the success traits, but only about 15 percent of people have them all and no prominent counterproductive traits. Many people have a combination of traits associated with effectiveness and counterproductive traits that interfere with performance and satisfaction. The LMAP Profile measures six counterproductive traits: Need for Approval, Dependence, Tension, Hostility, Rigidity, and Need to Control. These traits are found by many research studies to interfere with effectiveness on the job.

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Personality and Leadership

Organizations place a premium on intellect, education, and technical knowledge – the “hard skills” that are the cost of entry into the professional world. While it’s tempting to think hard skills alone will assure success, they are necessary, but not sufficient, for leadership effectiveness. More often, it is personality and its impact on leadership that determines who excels in a leadership role.

Personality operates like a lens through which all actions and behavior are filtered and through which knowledge, skills and competencies are sharpened or blurred. Personality traits can positively accentuate or negatively compromise the skills and abilities of a leader. Studies and everyday experience show that personality can propel a person of fairly average intelligence and education to great heights or cause even the smartest person to fail. Personality impacts everything.

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Personality and Crew Error

(adapted from: Ronald A. Warren , The Achievement Paradox (Chapter 4), 2002)

This paper explores the relationships between personality and performance in commercial airline pilots. In no other industry are these relationships more dramatically played out than in the airline industry. Seventy five percent of commercial airline accidents are caused by human error, with flight crew failure at the top of the list.

Three out of four plane crashes wouldn’t have occured if the crew had practiced effective management and communications to resolve a critical situation.

How do such lapses in basic leadership, management and communications skills occur in this highly trained commercial airline pilot population? The Former Deputy Head of Flight Safety at Swissair said, “We can change switches and instruments, but not human nature. We’re all just ‘normal’ neurotics who must be taught to know and live with our problems and weaknesses.”

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The Human in Human Capital

(adapted from: Ronald A. Warren , The Achievement Paradox (Chapter 1), 2002)

Human capital includes IQ, education, technical knowledge, job-specific skills, professional experience, work ethic, and personality. Each component in this equation contributes to your value in the marketplace, but there are significant differences between these components of human capital. Although many people believe that personality and behavior styles are unchangeable, compared to the other components of human capital, personality and behavior are in fact the most easily modified. Consider the following:

1. You can’t increase your IQ; research has shown that it peaks in your early twenties.
2. You cannot dramatically increase your creativity or common sense; these appear to be inborn and relatively set by adulthood.
3. You can increase your education, but not without considerable investments of time and money.
4. You can develop your technical skills, but like education, this requires time and money, and is ultimately limited by IQ and opportunity.
5. You can gain more experience, but experience comes gradually over time and is a constant that operates equally for all.
6. You can increase your work hours in an attempt to increase your productivity, but this often leads to burnout and job dissatisfaction.

Compared to the obstacles presented by the other components of human capital, a self-directed effort to understand your personality and to consciously modify your behavior is a fast, inexpensive track toward professional development. There are no time limitations, no barriers to opportunity – no constraints except those that you impose upon yourself.

The only cost is the mental energy you expend in making a significant effort to think before you act. In fact, by simply making an effort to change one single element of your behavior, you can make noticeable progress in becoming a better leader. In this way, the means becomes an end in and of itself.

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Normative Benchmarks: Best-Practice in Personality Measures

Assessments use representative or normative samples, ‘norms,’ to interpret participants’ scores relative to the scores of other people. Norms provide comparative benchmarks, and a best practice for measuring personality, behavior and performance.

The LMAP 360 Assessment is standardized on a normative sample of 1,013 self-assessments and over 12,000 feedback ratings collected in 2007-2008. The normative sample includes senior managers and executives from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia representing a range of industries, including healthcare, financial services, consulting, information technology and manufacturing.

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